THE JOY OF SETS A Short History of the Television Chris Horrocks r e a k t i o n b o o k s
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44 48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2017 Copyright Chris Horrocks 2017 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 758 9
CONTENTS Introduction 7 1 From Fantasy to Physics 11 2 Inventing Television 32 3 Television at War 59 4 Consuming the Receiver 75 5 Alien Television 101 6 Space Ship, Black Box, Flat Screen 127 7 Art Against Television 157 Epilogue: The Ends of Television 179 References 194 Bibliography 209 Photo Acknowledgements 217 Index 219
The Samsung I-profile Serif television set by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, 2015.
INTRODUCTION The role of the television is in large part to remove itself from the world in order to produce images. Turned on, it sees from afar, but the viewer is also taken away from the object, transported through the glass into a place elsewhere. It occupies a dimension unlike any other artefact, because it inhabits a space between presence and absence: both a screen and a window. The television brings images to our room, and we are carried away by them, yet the television still remains. Detached from the world but also arising in it, the tv is a contradictory object. This book is about the television set. In television construction and design, in marketing and advertising and in a multitude of creative approaches to the television object through film and art, television s purpose, arrival and reception are phrased as a continual attempt to deliver an identity for and through television. Although the economics and politics of the television manufacturing and broadcasting industries are essential to understanding how the television appears in its recognizable role in society, this book foregrounds the interrelationship of its physical and symbolic existence, as a cultural and material form. The television is an artefact that arises from a preoccupation with images. From television cabinet design and early illustrations preceding its arrival, to adverts extolling the object s
the joy of sets 8 significance as a luxury or status object, these media fantasies dictated what was possible to think or imagine about new technologies as they emerged. The medium and technology of television is as important as the history of its appearance in literature and the visual arts prior to its arrival in the everyday world. 1 This artefact is involved in a cultural history that combines fact and fiction, in which contested claims of origin and authority give rise to a series of images and texts that deal in sometimes exaggerated or satirical representations of its invention, discovery, breakthrough and setbacks. These sometimes place the figure of the great inventor at the centre of a narrative based on firstism. 2 In British literature the Scot John Logie Baird is central; in the usa Philo Taylor Farnsworth is the father of television. For Germany Paul Nipkow is its inventor. Russia claims Boris Rosing, and Japan Kenjiro Takayanagi. These characters dramatized in engineering journals, popular mechanics magazines and histories of television appear against a backdrop of national competition, advancement and institutional and corporate rivalry. But tv s inventor depends on what is meant by that artefact called the television, which is as much a cultural fabrication as the object is one of material construction. The cultural form of television is inseparable from its material form. The tv set is a designed, crafted and manufactured implementation of the forces, effects and conditions of the sciences as a visual and material form connecting to a domestic world of taste, class and luxury. The transition of the television set from the 1920s to the 1950s, interrupted by war, grounded it in our domestic space as an object partly like any other, such as furniture, but detached from the world of objects on account of its ability to conjure images from the outside world. By degrees its institutionalization and corporate identity have imbued it
introduction 9 with meanings and representations in advertising and product design which designated a visual and symbolic grammar that quickly became familiar to its consumers, until the disappearance of the television set into a minimal, black or grey box in the 1980s. This withdrawal of the set was accelerated by the obsolescence of the cathode ray tube (crt), and the integration of the flat screen with the wall or bookshelf. Such an exploration of the television set attempts to capture the imagined appearance, materialization and evanescence of this strange object and its associated symbolic manifestations. But this story begins before the set, with the depiction of the television in the nineteenth century, in which early science fiction and fantasy illustration joined the popular interest in spiritualism, the dynamics of imperialism and the vogue for Victorian experiments with electro-magnetism. Tensions between amateur enthusiasts and state institutions cast the television as an object of mystery and allure, one that was met by early consumer instruction manuals on how to educate its new public in treating this alien artefact. This book argues that the arrival of war was an impetus for increased research on the television, and heralded its future reception on the emerging market as an object that had proven itself in battle and was ready to enter the home as a reliable object. The instruction books for the army of television repairmen that had to negotiate the domestic space are testament to the new social dynamics the television produced. As the television became a mass consumer product it acquired and enshrined a set of values that articulated its contradictory existence. Where nineteenth-century literature had proposed it as a fantastic future idea, twentieth-century advertising sold it as an instantly available lifestyle object. In film and television, as well as in post-war literature, the television adopted a more ambivalent presence in contrast to its now familiar status as
the joy of sets 10 household equipment. tv has appeared in culture as a sinister object capable of controlling thought, monitoring its audience and causing mental and physical harm. I will explore how the design of the television ran parallel to this in its reference to broader technological narratives, where the space race and science fiction movies had a direct material impact on the styling and symbolism of the tv set. In addition, the rising distrust of the television as a tool of the corporation became the subject for artists working with the receiver in the art gallery, where it became the content of radical art by Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Finally, I will show how the television as a classic object began to disappear once the cathode ray tube became obsolete and flat-screen versions merged with the wall. The problem of television s departure with the rise of new media technology and the challenges of disposing of it as a thing that resists its return to the environment conclude this story of an object in search of an identity.